Moment Energy official Series B image for its second-life EV battery storage platform

features May 10, 2026

Second-Life EV Batteries Are Becoming a Grid Power Story

Moment Energy's $40 million raise is a reminder that used EV batteries are becoming part of the data-center, microgrid, and industrial power conversation — if safety and certification can keep up.

By Marcus Holloway

Used EV batteries are starting to matter after they leave the car.

That sounds obvious, but it is a bigger shift than it first appears. For years, the electric-vehicle battery conversation has mostly been about range, charging speed, warranty coverage, and whether recycling could recover enough critical minerals at the end of the pack’s life. Now a different question is moving forward: what if a pack that is no longer ideal for a vehicle is still valuable as stationary storage?

That is why Moment Energy’s latest funding round is worth paying attention to. The company announced a $40 million Series B on May 5, bringing its total capital raised to more than $100 million. The round was led by Evok Innovations, with participation from Liberty Mutual Investments, W23 Global Fund, and Acario, alongside existing backers including Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Voyager Ventures, and In-Q-Tel.

On paper, that is a startup financing story. For EV owners and shoppers, it points to something more practical: the battery in a modern EV may have a useful second career long after it stops being the right fit for a car.

Why Second-Life Batteries Make Sense

A vehicle battery has a brutal job. It has to handle rapid acceleration, cold starts, high-power charging, summer heat, winter road trips, vibration, crash protection, packaging constraints, and thousands of cycles while living under a vehicle. When its usable capacity falls enough, or when the economics of keeping it in a vehicle no longer make sense, that does not mean the cells are worthless.

Stationary storage is a different duty cycle. A battery sitting beside a building, factory, charging site, or microgrid does not need to deliver 0-60 mph acceleration. It can be cooled, monitored, serviced, and operated inside a narrower performance window. That opens the door for retired EV modules to support peak shaving, backup power, renewable-energy smoothing, or local resilience.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has framed the same basic opportunity: batteries that are past their best vehicle life can still have serviceable value for stationary storage. That is the core appeal. If the pack can be safely tested, repackaged, monitored, insured, and eventually recycled, it may avoid becoming waste while also reducing demand for newly manufactured stationary-storage batteries.

The timing matters. Data centers, electrified factories, charging depots, hospitals, and remote facilities all want more dependable power. The grid is not expanding at the same pace everywhere. A second-life battery system does not replace transmission lines or utility-scale generation, but it can give a site more control over demand spikes and backup needs.

Moment Energy Is Selling Certification, Not Just Sustainability

The easy pitch for second-life batteries is environmental: reuse a battery before recycling it. The harder pitch is trust.

A repurposed battery system has to satisfy building owners, utilities, insurers, fire officials, and customers who cannot treat energy storage like a science project. That is where Moment is trying to separate itself. The company says it has achieved UL 1974 and UL 9540A safety milestones for its second-life battery systems, and its public framing leans heavily on certification rather than feel-good recycling language.

That distinction matters. The second-life battery industry has always sounded clever. The problem is that clever is not enough when the system is installed at a factory, data center, hospital, or remote resort. The pack needs battery-health screening, thermal management, controls, enclosure design, fire-safety planning, monitoring software, and a service model that can catch weak modules before they become expensive problems.

TechCrunch’s report notes that Moment’s approach involves taking EV battery packs, replacing the original automaker battery-management logic, and managing the modules with its own software inside larger storage systems. That is the unglamorous engineering layer that decides whether the second-life idea scales or stalls.

It also helps explain why Liberty Mutual’s investment arm showing up in the round is interesting. Insurance is not the sexiest part of the EV story, but for stationary storage it is crucial. A system that is hard to insure is hard to sell, no matter how elegant the battery-reuse story sounds.

The AI Power Boom Is Pulling EV Batteries Into a New Market

Moment is not pitching second-life storage only as a green add-on. It is positioning the technology as power infrastructure for a world where electricity demand is getting more complicated.

The company specifically points to AI, electrification, industrial demand, and grid constraints. That tracks with the broader market. Data centers are looking for faster ways to add capacity. Manufacturers want to cut demand charges and improve resilience. Remote facilities want less diesel runtime. Charging operators need ways to buffer high-power loads without waiting forever for grid upgrades.

This is where EV batteries become part of a much bigger energy conversation. A car battery that once moved a crossover through traffic might later help a factory avoid a demand spike, keep a microgrid stable, or support a charging site during peak hours.

That does not make second-life storage a magic fix. Used packs vary by chemistry, age, temperature history, charging habits, and degradation pattern. Automaker pack designs are not standardized around easy reuse. Logistics can be messy. Testing and sorting cost money. And once the battery finishes its second life, recycling still has to happen.

But the economics improve if companies can build repeatable systems around known supply streams. Moment says it partners with major automakers, including Mercedes-Benz Energy, and TechCrunch reports that it has signed supply deals with Mercedes-Benz and Nissan. Those relationships matter because second-life storage is only scalable if the battery pipeline is dependable and traceable.

What This Means for EV Owners

For a shopper, the immediate takeaway is not that your old EV battery is suddenly a retirement account. Most owners will never personally remove, sell, or repurpose their pack. The useful lesson is bigger: EV battery value is becoming less binary.

A battery can be too degraded for an ideal vehicle application and still valuable somewhere else. That should improve the long-term logic of EV ownership if the industry handles it correctly. Better second-life pathways can reduce waste, improve residual value assumptions, and make automakers more serious about designing packs that are serviceable and traceable.

It also changes the way we should talk about battery recycling. Recycling is still essential. Critical minerals should not be stranded forever in retired packs. But reuse-before-recycling can be the smarter sequence when a battery has enough remaining life and can be deployed safely.

The best version of this system looks like a clean chain: EV use, battery-health assessment, second-life stationary storage, monitored operation, then recycling when the pack is genuinely spent. The weak version looks like mystery modules, vague safety claims, and batteries moved around without enough accountability. The difference is certification, software, supply-chain discipline, and honest end-of-life planning.

The Bottom Line

Moment Energy’s $40 million raise is not as flashy as a new electric truck or a 350-kW charging claim. But it may be just as important for the EV ecosystem.

EVs do not exist in isolation. They depend on mines, cell factories, charging networks, utilities, recyclers, insurers, and software systems. Second-life storage sits right in the middle of that chain. It can make EV batteries more useful, make energy storage less dependent on new cells, and give power-hungry sites another tool while the grid catches up.

The catch is that the industry has to make reuse boring in the best possible way: certified, insurable, monitored, repeatable, and safe. If Moment and its rivals can do that, the used EV battery may become less of a disposal problem and more of a quiet piece of the next power grid.